This is a strange take. They contend that the courts not forbidding website owners from refusing access to adblock users is a bad thing somehow, as if the courts should have forced businesses to serve them... The German courts took the only logical conclusion: You can block ads all you want, and website owners can block you all they want.
I very much agree with this bit.
The real worry is the next step, as per your TOS you force me to render your website content only in an "approved" signed browser. This is a step several players are pushing towards (Netflix and others are already there, but for distinct reasons- at least they degrade your experience if you aren't using an approved stack).
This we need to fight against.
Or, even more broadly, what if the device you're watching on has insufficient compute to accomplish the task? Do you, as proverbial Netflix's chief engineer or whatever, degrade the quality of the experience so things run smoothly, or do you press on and let the user choose a worse experience, and leave nasty feedback on public listings/forums/what have you?
I don't mean to argue for the Netflix's in this situation, I'm just genuinely curious what HN thinks of this: in a situation where whatever tech a user is bringing to the table is insufficient to run your product, be it hardware or software, what do you do?
I've been in a situation myself where the tech stack of our user base was directly contributing to the stream of angry emails our support was getting and was forbidden by management to gate content only to those who we knew could run it, yet simultaneously was held responsible for the negative impressions of our product as a result of it. I left that job soon after because it was an obvious lose/lose scenario.
Rather than deal with hypotheticals let's focus on reality, a lot of people have put a lot of effort into ensuring that web browsers can run the same content on every platform. This is already a solved problem, even if imperfect.
The only genuine reason a device might not be able to play a browser supported 4k video is because it's too resource expensive (rare) and this is simply an immutable property of computers that isn't going to change unless you are expecting all users to use the exact same hardware forever.
What we're seeing now, is purely political, or at the very least business-strategic, and linux is being purposefully omitted as an un-attested platform since it precisely gives users too much control/takes away revenue from someone's bottom line. The same thing could be said for console games which never hit pc at all either. And the last example which i think really brings it home is that ms teams not only doesnt work on firefox, linux is also off the table. Not because of any technical limitations in the least, as an off the shelf dell laptop + ubuntu + ff will give you a working video conferencing solution with google meet. Out. Of. The. Box. So it certainly isn't technically limited. It is rather chosen to be this way to force users into windows + edge or their native app solution.
This is the reason I refuse to use streaming platforms even though I have enough money to pay for them. It's not a question of money. It's a question of: paying money to install spyware on my computer for the privilege of streaming low-quality video on a list of pre-approved devices? That is simply not gonna happen.
Imagine coming into a discussion telling of a thing you experienced and then the reply is: I don't want to discuss hypotheticals, which is great because a) this isn't a hypothetical, it's the reason I quit my last job and b) you replied to my comment, which is the only way you could possibly even have the chance to discuss this.
I am explaining (admittedly with low detail because Internet) an actual situation I experienced, and it's not like there aren't all manner of entertainment product available on the market which requires a floor of technical power to consume in a way the average consumer would deem acceptable, be that hardware requirements like VR or other bespoke controlling apparatus, or looser ones like the minimum requirements on videogames, or more is-or-isn't ones like the ability for streamer boxes, phones or tablets to playback video of a given resolution and at a given frame rate.
This is the core of what you were asking, perhaps my answer was too roundabout for you. What I'm trying to tell you is that:
- This question is a hypothetical because it's not true, you can encode videos to play on every platform so long as it's browser supported, this is not 2013
- There is not a technical floor in video playback of even 4k videos unless you are playing on something like a first gen raspberry pi, and even then, bandwidth constraints necessitate multi-quality video support regardless
- VR and other "manners of entertainment" are moving goal posts and irrelevant to this discussion
- Streaming content to multiple platforms is a solved problem, if you failed to accomplish this then it sounds to me that you probably couldn't do your job
- Using platform based attestation to resolve this technical incompetentcy is an unreasonable solution to the problem and deserving of complaints
poor people have to suffer ads or be excluded, which is fine if the content is something not of interest to the general public, but it is not fine at all if it is eg facebook or youtube.
add to that that poorer segments of the population tend to be less well educated and thus more susceptible to manipulation.
if you force ads on people you must do so to everyone equally and block adblockers equally. any exchange of money creates a situation where only those that can afford it can protect themselves
if you charge for access you may not offer the same access for the price of watching ads. it should be either one or the other
1. Company stuffs ads down my throat.
2. I use adblocker
3. Company blocks me
4. I ignore company.
The whole problem starts at (1) which is "create a business supported only by advertising revenue". That says your actual product is worth fuck all.
Look I use ad blockers and a pi-hole. And I don't bother reading paywalled sites that I don't pay for. But your comment is a little harsh. It is a sad reality of the internet that there are so few options for generating revenue. I wish there was a micro-payment model where part of my monthly ISP payment was divvied up and paid to websites based on volume of content read by me. That way niche websites (like, for example, hobby sites or local sites) could get some income without having to resort to ads or fundraising. In my view the real ripoff are the exorbitant monthly fees I pay to my ISP.
Your idea sounds a fantastic way to make a system incredibly complicated with no actual gain other than a billing dystopia.
something like that already exists: https://www.contentpass.net/en
It's a bit more complex than that as the market is long oversaturated with products and services, that is, there are not enough buyers compared to the number of products and services, but that awful thing called consumerism calls for more and more production anyway to keep the machine going and prices down, therefore companies need to fight hard for potential customers attention, and one way to achieve that goal is to put their names on every possible free spot where one's eyes might look. There's nothing wrong in being dependent on advertising, but at the level necessary today it simply doesn't scale anymore, and on the web a lot more than half of the (sometimes metered) traffic is already made of advertising, and is growing steadily. We already know where this thing is leading: more and more advertising, coupled with less and less attention which in turn will generate the need for even more advertising.
It doesn't scale and it doesn't work anymore like it should. I would rather start looking right now for alternatives, for example one where (local) governments convert a tax collected from all registered companies to a system of unobtrusive advertising which by rotating equally, still being weighted according to the amount of investment in research, production, personnel, etc. would guarantee fair exposure to all businesses. That would be however deeply against current idea of uncontrolled capitalism, though, therefore we likely will have to wait for the day the world will be ready for a more mature, harmless way of doing business.
Between crap like Admiral, GDPR nag screens that help no one, incessant useless live chat boxes, large banners on mobile that are pinned to the tops and bottoms of views (doubly so if they’re simply cosmetic), “spin the wheel for a discount” modals, and SMS spam signup schemes, many websites are quite annoying to use and very user-hostile on the modern internet.
The most asinine part of that is the fucking site has already delivered the content. They incurred whatever costs their multi-megabyte bloated JavaScript monstrosity requires and only then blocks it with a stupid blocking banner.
They'd incur the same (or less) costs if they just sent a static HTML page with the content. Doing this they could still make advertising money with a simple text add saying "this content brought to you by Slurm" inline with the content. Just log analysis will get them a ton of visitor information some overwrought AdTech product promises will revolutionize their synergies.
A $5 VPS with its included terabyte of data transfer can serve so many fucking web pages in a month. Loading that down with autoplaying videos, megabytes of uncompressed PNGs, and a dozen copies of Doom worth of JavaScript is just a ludicrous pointless cost. A sprinkle of CSS can make those basic pages look amazing.
As for ads I prefer Brave Browser model, where I pay websites directly, bypassing advertisers.
0: https://old.reddit.com/r/brave_browser/comments/a8d34y/youtu... they try to defend the opt-out model, lol
But yeah, if you use youtube a lot, at least premium does exist as a more morally righteous choice if you don't really care about the tracking side of things and are mostly just annoyed at ads themselves. Which I'd imagine is most people.
Uh, no.
With UBO and YT Premium, the only API calls that are blocked are:
www.youtube.com/generate_204 - seems to be to detect if client is online (since YT has a desktop offline mode)
www.youtube.com/api/stats/qoe (https://stackoverflow.com/a/68823010)
www.youtube.com/ptracking - general playback tracking
It's all first-party, no other ad trackers are loaded.
All of YouTube's tracking is done via your "watch history" which is via the api www.youtube.com/api/stats/watchtime. Most blockers don't block this since, as a user, you kind of expect the most useful features of YouTube to work - tracking how far into the video you've gotten (so you can return later at the same moment), and having your watch history be used to curate your recommended feed to give you more videos.
Nope, it’s called “negotiation”. Here’s the money I want to pay for your service. You don’t want it? Fine, I’ll leave it here in case you change your mind.
(Youtube can die in my book, I’ll just shrug.)
All I'm saying is that it is "piracy" by definition, even if it's morally acceptable and basically 0 risk to partake in (AFAIK the only criminal offenders of Piracy have been booked for distribution, at least in the US).
You directly pay Brave, who then distributes funds to some participating websites. Additionally, they take a 30% cut of the value of their "basic attention token" shitcoin for themselves.
This isn't worse than the way ads work anyway, so that seems fine.
> Additionally, they take a 30% cut of the value
I also don't see the problem here. They develop the browser, the infra, etc. What is the problem?
What is it that you people want?
It's open source software implementing anti-features. Why should I willingly share the value of my attention with my browser vendor?
Let's take a simple rule from EasyList:
> /snowplow.js
This blocks the loading of any URL ending in snowplow.js. To see if a visitor to my website is using an ad blocker with EasyList, I can set a global variable `window.usingAdBlocker = true;` in my main content and then later change it in a scriptcalled snowplow.js that I include (`window.usingAdBlocker = false;`). So with a fresh Chrome install, the page loads and then the script sets the variable to false. However, with an ad blocker, the script never loads and the variable remains true.
> why blockers are not able to bypass detection?
Adblockers have developed rules to block this detection mechanism. It is a cat and mouse game. For example, there's a library called 'jQuery Adblock'. So the AakList (Anti-Adblock Killer) has a rule to block scripts called `/jquery.adblock.js`
It is a cat and mouse game.
Oh boy. They sure are. Many countries their governments post their videos on youtube. Many employers put their training videos on youtube. And so on.
> No one is forcing you to go to Youtube or whatever
If they wanted, they could lock it down and force you to log in and agree to a bunch of rules in order to use the service, but they don't.
This is absolutely the correct conclusion to come to, given that the Internet is really "just" a network of networks (still an amazing thing, don't get me wrong), and when one connects a device to a network, they should have absolute control over the data that device allows to flow to and from the "outside world", for the safety of the user, the device, and for the health of the larger "outside" network. This holds even more true when connecting a network to another network. For your own security, you (should) run a firewall at the very least. Even better is when all devices on the network all have their firewall enabled, but sadly, not all devices were designed with network security in mind, so that's not always possible.
TL;DR: All the above is just to say an adblocker is just another form of the end user exercising control over the data that flows into and out of their devices / network, as they've always been able to, until advertising companies (which initially all scoffed at the entire idea of advertising on the "passing fad" Internet) decided that they had a right to our eyeballs and our devices' network data flows at any time and in any way they please.